‘She was in their front garden. What an immaculately turned-out woman. She was a lecturer at some fancy London university, and he was a neurosurgeon. He went to Cambridge. So clever! They have lovely accents, don’t they? Very well spoken. They still have a flat in London. And a country pad in the Cotswolds. Old money. You can tell.’ She dusts down her trousers. ‘Anyway, where’s Rufus?’
‘Oh, so you’ve noticed your grandson isn’t here?’
She shakes her head at me in mock exasperation. ‘Of course.’
‘I thought you were too dazzled by Henry Morgan to notice anything else,’ I tease.
‘Oh, stop it.’ She hides a giggle behind her hand. ‘But he’s handsome, isn’t he? Very debonair. Like Sean Connery.’
‘Mum! He looks nothing like Sean Connery!’
‘Okay, maybe a taller Paul Newman then.’ She bends down to stroke Phoenix, who is nuzzling her leg. ‘So where’s my grandson?’
‘At Charlie’s.’ I glance at the clock. It’s nearly lunchtime. ‘He’ll be back in a minute.’ I’d checked Find My Phone and he was only around the corner. Jo thinks that now Rufus is seventeen I shouldn’t be tracking him any more. But I can’t help it. I like to know where he is when he’s not at home. It’s always so reassuring to see that he’s arrived at his destination safely.
Rufus had called me while I was at work yesterday, asking if he could spend another night at Charlie’s because one of his friends was having a party not far away. I’d been almost winded with disappointment, not to mention terror at having to spend another night alone. I’d hardly slept, waking up at every creak coming from the house, although thankfully there were no repeats of Thursday night. I’m exhausted today and so relieved that the house will be full tonight.
As if on cue I hear the key in the lock and Rufus saunters in. His mass of sandy hair, just like Charlie’s, is dishevelled and he looks as though he’s slept in his clothes. My heart soars at the sight of him and sinks when he’s followed byCharlie. Why is he here? He hasn’t set foot in the house since he left. The living room still looks bare since he took out his huge speakers and sound system, and the study at the foot of the stairs was where he kept his drum kit but now houses only Rufus’s guitar.
Mum, who has barely sat down, jumps up again to give Rufus a hug, and then Charlie. I try not to feel offended that she hasn’t hugged me since she arrived.
For a few seconds everything feels like it used to: this time last year we might have gone for a pub lunch. We might have sat outside, at that nice place in Clifton Village, filling up on artisan bread. Charlie would have had a lager, Rufus the fish and chips, his favourite, Mum the Welsh rarebit and a glass of wine. Things can change so much in a year.
‘How did you get on last night? Was the party fun? And how was the gig on Thursday?’ I ask, hugging Rufus and avoiding Charlie’s gaze. ‘Was it good?’
‘Yep,’ he replies, opening the fridge and sticking his head inside.
‘Meet anyone new at the party? Any nice girls?’
‘Nope.’ And that’s all I’ll get out of him as he removes a packet of pre-cooked mini sausages and starts stuffing them into his mouth. Maybe, now he’s older, he feels more comfortable talking to Charlie about this kind of stuff. I’ve always been over-involved. Charlie once called me a ‘mama bear’ and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. I do find it hard to listen to reason when it comes to Rufus because my instinct is always to fight hard for him in a way my mum never did for me. I still remember how shereacted when I left my midwifery course. And then, later, when I moved to Bristol. She was never on my side.
‘Goodness, Charlie, don’t you feed the child?’ Mum asks.
Charlie shrugs. ‘You know what he’s like. I don’t know where he puts it.’ Then he catches my eye. ‘I … er … was wondering if I could have a quick word, Lena?’ His gaze goes to my mum and then back to me. ‘In private?’
Mum looks mildly offended but starts fussing around Rufus so I lead Charlie into the living room.
‘I like what you’ve done in here,’ he says, taking in the newly painted pale pink walls and new velvet cushions. ‘Very … minimalist.’
‘That’s because most of your stuff used to be in here.’ There’s a throb of awkward silence.
He clears his throat. ‘You look well,’ he says, appraising me.
‘Wish I could say the same for you.’ I laugh to take the sting out of the words.
‘And straight to the point, as usual,’ he quips. Avoidance tactics, but we play out our usual roles. He thrusts his hands into the pockets of his jeans. His sandy-brown hair is still showing no signs of grey, but I can see flecks of white in his stubble.
‘Band going well?’
‘Not bad.’
Charlie’s band, Moderation, had some early success at the height of the Britpop era back in the mid- to late 1990s with a hit single that Radio 1 used to play endlessly, and a record deal for one album. The band – particularly thelead singer, Sirus – had been young and good-looking, but when they failed to write anything as catchy again they were subsequently dropped and have spent the last twenty-odd years trying to replicate it. Now in their mid-forties, they are still performing at gigs in small venues around the West Country. Charlie also works as a painter and decorator for his dad’s company, which he likes for its flexibility, but in the belief he’d be a huge rock star one day, he never bothered with any further education after he left school.
I’d met him after his flurry of success, in November 2004. I hadn’t been living in Bristol long and didn’t recognize him when I got chatting to him at a pub in Clifton as we stood at the bar waiting to be served. He’d laughed at that, his sparkly eyes crinkling as he acknowledged, ‘Nobody remembers the drummer,’ which wasn’t quite true, but I didn’t want to burst his bubble by admitting I just didn’t rememberhim. I’d been smitten from that very first meeting. He was tall and broad and, as Jo described him later, ‘very manly’. I’d always gone for finer-boned, wiry men with floppy hair and big eyes but there had been something about him, the relaxed way he stood at the bar, as though he had all the time in the world, confidence that was just on the right side of cocky, his gaze, which he fixed on me while I talked, making me feel like the most important person in the room and that I could do anything, be anyone.
It wasn’t long before I moved into his swanky flat near the Downs, which he’d bought at the height of his fame, and I became the band’s – or rather Charlie’s – number-one fan. I preferred their newer music, which was moremature, nuanced, and I believed they would hit the heights of that first single. I really did. Charlie’s optimism was infectious. Me, who’d always been a glass-half-empty person, falling in love with a man who truly believed his cup ran over. And things were great, at first, when he wasn’t weighed down by responsibility, when he was young enough to think fame could still happen. When he could take off whenever he fancied to play a gig in some random town up or down the country – even abroad – and I could go with him.
I put my own career on hold to accompany him – not that I had much of one by then. Five years earlier I’d left my midwifery training, having become disillusioned after everything that happened with Simone. I’d looked up to her before I started to suspect what she was involved in. It turned out I’d been right about that, but the whole experience had left me depressed. I spent the next few years doing temp work for a recruitment agency. I fell hard for Charlie. But when I found out I was pregnant with Rufus eighteen months after we’d met, when I was twenty-six, things moved quickly. I wanted to put down roots, give our baby a stable upbringing. Charlie had been twenty-seven and I knew he felt he wasn’t ready to be a father. He was still a big kid himself. So I was shocked when, just as I’d begun to show, he took me out to dinner in a fancy restaurant in town and slid a blue velvet box across the table.
